$10 billion Dropbox has filed the paperwork for an IPO

Dropbox has filed paperwork for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission confidentially, Bloomberg reported.

The company plans to list shares in the first half of the year, the report says.

Its latest known valuation of $10 billion was during a 2014 funding round.

Dropbox, the cloud-computing storage company most recently valued at $10 billion, has confidentially filed the paperwork for an initial public offering expected in the first half of the year, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Uber, the highest-valued private tech company, is not expected to go public until 2019.

San Francisco-based Dropbox has been expected to go public since news reports surfaced last year that it had retained the investment bank Goldman Sachs. Bloomberg said JPMorgan Chase had also been tapped to serve as a lead underwriter on widely anticipated IPO.

Dropbox says more than 500 million people use its online software service, designed to let consumers and businesses save documents in the cloud and access them from any device.

The company says on its website that Dropbox for Business, the premium product considered its most important business, has 200,000 customers.

Dropbox declined to comment.

'Cash is oxygen'

Dropbox's financial results are not publicly known, but the company said last January that it was on track to generate $1 billion in revenue at an annual run rate.

CEO Drew Houston said in June 2016 that Dropbox was "cash flow positive," a gauge of financial health that Wall Street follows. But that doesn't mean Dropbox's business is profitable on a net basis yet.

"Cash is oxygen," Houston said in an interview at the time. "Even just being a dollar cash flow positive is a really critical threshold because it lets you control your destiny."

The company's latest reported valuation of $10 billion came during a venture-capital funding round in 2014.

If the company were to go public at that valuation with $1 billion in revenue, it would fetch a 10x revenue multiple. Box, Dropbox's closest competitor in the enterprise business, had an 8x multiple during its 2015 IPO.

Dropbox has been steadily building out its senior management team as it moves toward a market debut, bringing on experienced hands like the former Google executive Dennis Woodside as its chief operating officer and the former Twitter product boss Todd Jackson as its head of product.